New data analysis competitions

This year’s challenge focuses on music recommendation, specifically the
challenge of automatic playlist continuation. By suggesting appropriate
songs to add to a playlist, a Recommender System can increase user
engagement by making playlist creation easier, as well as extending
listening beyond the end of existing playlists.

How-to

Privacy

One day a new icon appeared on Liu’s Alipay home screen. It was labeled
Zhima Credit (or Sesame Credit). The name, like that of Alipay’s parent
company, evoked the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, in which the words
open sesame magically unseal a cave full of treasure. When Liu touched the
icon, he was greeted by an image of the Earth. “Zhima Credit is the
embodiment of personal credit,” the text underneath read. “It uses big data
to conduct an objective assessment. The higher the score, the better your
credit.” Further down was a button that read, in clean white characters,
“Start my credit journey.” He tapped.

[...] For the Chinese Communist Party, social credit is an attempt at a
softer, more invisible authoritarianism. The goal is to nudge people toward
behaviors ranging from energy conservation to obedience to the Party.
Samantha Hoffman, a consultant with the International Institute for
Strategic Studies in London who is researching social credit, says that the
government wants to preempt instability that might threaten the Party.
“That’s why social credit ideally requires both coercive aspects and nicer
aspects, like providing social services and solving real problems. It’s all
under the same Orwellian umbrella.”

As these artificial neural networks are starting to be used in law
enforcement, health care, scientific research, and determining which news
you see on Facebook, researchers are saying there’s a problem with what some
have called AI’s “black box.” Previous research has shown that algorithms
amplify biases in the data from which they learn, and make inadvertent
connections between ideas.

Enterprise and academic experts cautioned the U.S. Senate Committee on
Commerce, Science and Transportation against a heavy-handed regulatory
approach to AI, citing concerns of stifling innovation and progress. At a
hearing Tuesday, experts did call for open data policies, as AI systems will
only be as good as the data they can draw insight and learn from. Yet data
policies today are also in the midst of change as privacy considerations and
fair use policies face scrutiny.

The newly-discovered Kepler-90i – a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits
its star once every 14.4 days – was found using machine learning from
Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which
computers “learn.” In this case, computers learned to identify planets by
finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded signals from
planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.